If we saw tomorrow's newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen.

As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed.

It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature.

The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.

As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.